The Threat

The keening grew louder as they climbed. He couldn’t imagine what it was. Then, as he crested the hill, he came to a stop where the president had already halted, looking down into a pit over which the choking haze hung low.

It was filled with forms that took him a moment to identify. Wasted, small figures lying on blankets and on the omnipresent blue tarps. These people might lack everything else, a horrified corner of his mind wisecracked. But they had enough blue plastic sheeting.

They’d been lying motionless, but when they noticed the group watching from above, they began to stir. They sat up. Left their games of tossing stones at bushes. Gradually a crowd gathered.

“Who are these kids?” De Bari wanted to know.

“Orphans,” the commissioner said. “Their families have been murdered. Or died of AIDS or cholera. When the children have no remaining family, we concentrate them. For their own protection.”

Dan looked at the open sky, the sprawling horror all around. But for some reason this seemed more appalling. These small withered creatures, huddling into groups out of the simple child’s desire to be close to someone.

A translator shouted something. The children hesitated. Then kept coming, stumbling up the hillock. Some were crawling. Individually they were just smudge-faced kids. His gaze went from one to the next. But there were hundreds, and more were getting to their feet and beginning to wander their way. The translator shouted again, but they didn’t stop. The air smelled of shit and smolder and something almost coppery, like blood.

“Let’s move back now, Mr. President,” McKoy said. He hand-signaled to the detail. The agents pincered out, taking positions between De Bari and the advancing tide. “Time to get back to the motorcade.”

The president didn’t move, so Dan moved up beside him. The kids were thirty yards away. Two spindly boys had the lead. One was wrapped in blue plastic. The other had found a man’s T-shirt somewhere. Stained and ragged, it flapped over bony knees swollen to the size of softballs. He led an even smaller girl by the hand. She looked up as they climbed, barefoot on the flinty hot ground. Her eyes were huge and very white against dusty skin.

“There should be shelter,” Dan heard the president say. “Not just these fucking tarps.”

“We’ve had to allocate all our transport space to fuel and food.”

“Why do these people need fuel?”

“They don’t, sir. We do. To transport the food to them.”

“Let’s move back, Mr. President.” McKoy again, insistent, as the children flowed to right and left, boxing them in now on three sides. A throng whose only sound was the shuffling of bare feet in cinders, and weeping sniffles from the smallest.

The smoke and dust parted to a hot breeze. When Dan lifted his gaze it went out over hundreds, no, thousands of children. It was like a battlefield, except that these still or slowly wandering forms were ridiculously small, absurdly thin, incredibly heartbreaking.

Now all the agents and even the UN people were moving to place themselves in front of where De Bari stood, somehow looking alone for the first time. No trace of the glad-handing politician now. Nor of the gangland don. He stood coughing, shoulders slumped, staring at the oncoming tide.

“Mr. President, we should go back,” the UN rep suggested.

“Sir, he’s right,” Dan put in.

He glanced back to make sure the way back over the lava and trash was still clear. Even the press people were backing away, though they were still recording, telecams intent. The press secretary looked apprehensive. The Moment, Dan thought. It might be here. But what kind of Moment would it turn out to be?

He took De Bari’s arm. But the president reached down and brushed his hand off, gaze still on the advancing throng.

The translator shouted again. But the children, fascinated by the strange beings they’d discovered, didn’t even slow. The smells of their bodies and clothes and diseases came up on the hot wind. A strange, dry, inhuman stink like a herd of dying animals. But close up they were not a herd. Just a boy in a ragged T-shirt. A girl with a dirty bandage around her head. Others carried sharpened sticks over their shoulders. Dan could not imagine what their lives were like, locked in this nightmare valley without food, or water, under the white relentless sky.

McKoy said, “Sir, you have to go back. This is dangerous.”

“They’re just kids.” De Bari’s first words since they’d started up the hill.

“If you don’t leave we’ll have to drag you back.”

“No,” De Bari said, so softly Dan almost couldn’t hear him. “Let ’em come.”

The agents and Dan looked at one another. Now, having completed the ring, some of the children were approaching De Bari. “Stop that one, with the stick,” McKoy shouted. An agent lurched forward, shoes crunching into the ash. The children separated slowly, like sleepwalkers, as he plunged through them.